Motorcycle Headlight Design 001

This is a headlight idea that I had in my head for a while now. It is a vertical style headlight with LED bulbs and an LED string light as well. This is a pod design, and not meant to be inserted flush into a body panel. It has bolt connection points in the back so that it can be attached to a small arm, which then connects to the front suspension links/frame.

I plan on using this for a custom chopper design render, that makes use of the shape throughout the body or the individual parts such as the exhaust pipes. (Also, I'll fix that spelling error later, if you can spot it...)

Chevrolet Silverado 7/8 Concepts

I worked on a few front end ideas for the 7/8 Silverado pickup truck. I did focus on the body design as well, but mostly I needed to experiment with the front end for this truck. I am aiming for a very revolutionary look, not only for a Chevrolet truck, but perhaps pickup trucks in general, especially the bigger ones. As a reminder, the 7/8 Silverado (I may as well call it that from now on) will be my idea for a model that fits in-between a midsize and a full-size truck. It is also going to be aimed at a more broader market range, heavily into the urban and suburban style markets where people usually use trucks as a daily driver and occasionally haul marginal amount of cargo.

While stacked headlights are a GM thing since the 1980's or so, I feel that the above grille design is too similar to something Ford has already done with the recent Atlas concept truck, especially because of those turn signals in the middle of the stack. However, the body design is looking more usable. I am not sure if the chrome trim will carry over to the final designs (the trim below the roof).

This is closer to the earlier concepts for the 7/8 Silverado, though I mixed in some chrome bar designs that Chevrolet is starting to use on some of their cars.

So, I even tried a "mini" K35 look. This front end design works best for a tried and true work truck. I do not like the feel it gives off for a more urban or family oriented truck.

I am not too happy about this one, but it was an experiment. The goal was to taper the side and top corners of the front end, but keep the center near vertical. This would create a very aerodynamic front end, but make for an awkward look for a truck. I did not color it because it just is not the shape I wish to go for, so I stopped the sketch half-way through.

Right now I plan on blending the designs in the second and third sketches, which would help to give it that familiar Chevrolet truck look, but also journey into new territory.

Up - The Untold Story

The old man didn't think about restricted air-spaces in his journey.

Chevrolet Silverado Concept - The 7/8 Truck

While working on my Silverado K35 concept, I started on a smaller truck, the Silverado. Right now I have not given it a unique name, but it will have to be named in a way that the truck appeals to a bigger demographic than the K35. At the very least, it is nicknamed the 7/8 truck due to it being situated in-between a midsize and a full-size truck in comparison.

This is the initial sketch, experimenting with a new look for a Chevrolet truck that may be polarizing. 

Further refining the front end, I find the headlight shapes a little tricky to get right without giving off a strange, abstract jumble of shapes in the grille area... 

The truck is supposed to look a lot wider, with a higher roof, but this sketch was to experiment with the front end again, but also with an idea i had for the cabin section, where the roof and the rear pillars are all one section, broken by a black line at the beltline. This truck is meant to look more at home sitting next to an impala on a suburban driveway for the common family, rather than the construction zone like the K35. Though, with the right equipment, this Silverado 7/8 is still purposeful for the construction zone! 

Looking a little thick. The body will be trimmed so that it does not look so bloated. I am still deciding on the cabin roof piece, though. Also, the final design may or may not feature a low suspension.

Chevrolet Silverado K35 Concept - Step by Step

This was just for fun. I find digital medium to be rather exciting, and while working on the front view of my K35 concept truck design, I saved some snapshots of the drawing at certain stages. At the time this post was made, I am still working on the render.

The only things left to do are the background, tires, and some detail refinement.

Chevrolet Silverado K35 Concept

Here are the first two images of the Chevrolet Silverado K35 concept truck. It is the first vehicle that I focused on in my project, and it will be the first completed once I finish additional renders and the interior design.

 Not much has changed from the pencil render shown in my previous post, but I did have to make some changers on the body and the headlights. The edge of the roof now has an additional surface that starts from the hood, travels up the A-pillar, over the doors, and then back down into the bed wall, also shown in the rear view below \/\/\/. The headlgihts have been changed so that they fit more with the theme of the truck. The bumper valance also has a dip in the middle to enlarge the intercooler opening and make more room for the front tow hooks. Working digitally has enabled me to create a cleaner sketch and focus more on the proportions, though I still value traditional medium, especially when I start the initial sketch work for a design.

Compared to the colored pencil sketch, not much has changed in the rear, except for the tailpipe placement. The rear design is supposed to give off a sporty look, while offering good usability, such as the dual-level bumper and the tailgate spoiler, which helps with aerodynamics, but also houses some small cargo storage bins inside (accessed when the tailgate is lowered).

I have yet to finish this truck design. I still have two or four more sketches I wish to complete, and I am still working on the interior. Once those are finished I will upload them in a new post. These renders are also my first fully completed digital renderings, and I liked what I have experienced from the Adobe programs so far.

Chevrolet Silverado CK-Series - Finalized Design

After experimenting with various styles and ideas, I finally settled on a look that continues the well-known stacked headlight look of Chevrolet trucks. I carried over the body style that I had worked on before, with a few miner changes. The following images show the more finalized designs, before I made the move to digital medium.

After finishing that quick scribble (shown in my previous post at the bottom), I wanted to draw it out in full detail. This is a marker sketch done to experiment with the overall look. The horizontal setup of the front grille was blacked out to go along with a theme I have noticed on some old and new Chevrolet cars. I also think that the blacked out wedge grille design could be a running theme with Chevrolet's cars and trucks as a way of identification, just like how BMW has the "kidney" grilles. Blacking out the A and B pillars was something was undecided on until I colored this sketch. One thing I decided on after this sketch was finished is that I also made the rear wedge blacked out to go with the rear.

After finalizing my ideas, I sketched out a full detailed rendering of the truck, with everything in place. The truck sports a clean, consistent look with none of the fuss, and also a feeling of understatement. The wheels were originally meant to imitate the conventional Alcoa wheels on semi trucks, but I decided on a very open spoke design to reduce the amount of flashy chrome. One thing I forgot to mention in my previous posts is that one of my inspirations for the body design comes from the horse saddle. 

This is the rear shot of the truck, with a more refined rear tailgate area. Compared to what is shown here, I have since changed the location of the exhaust tips from the rear to the sides, due to the fact that this is a diesel-powered truck, and usually diesel vehicles have their exhaust pipes pointing out from the side. This angle view also gives a sense of scale with the truck. It is a crewcab with a long dually bed, but the hood is half a foot longer than any current Silverado pickup truck, and the rear tailgate spoiler adds a couple more inches to the length. The reason for the longer hood was meant to balance out the usually chunky proportions of dually trucks. Production versions of this truck will definitely have to tone down the hood size, of course.

By opening up my mind, it aided in my creativity. If I had still lived like a "fanboy" I would have gone for an overly traditional look that only the most hardcore fans of Chevrolet trucks would have liked. I feel that this finalized design is a result of experimenting with new things rather than sticking with the old, since fans usually want to stick with old things all of the time because they are most familiar and comfortable with them. Of course, you can never stay with the same thing all the time. Eventually, things have to change, or it will slip into irrelevancy. I feel that hardcore Chevrolet fans out there may hate my new designs, but then again, that always seems to happen whenever a new design comes along even from General Motors themselves!

Chevrolet Silverado CK-Series - The Old School Look

One thing that I have yet to upload on my blog is my old Transformer design project. That project featured a main character that changes into a 2011 Chevrolet Silverado 3500. It was 2009, and there were only teaser photos of that truck released at the time. Regardless, the reason for the use of a large American pickup truck is because I have always loved the large crew-cab dually pickup trucks from the General Motors Company. 

The Transformers project is long dead now, for a lot of reasons. But, it ended shortly after I had decided on designing my own Chevrolet truck for the character, because I had gotten fed up with the quirky design of the 2011 trucks, and the custom look I was designing just would not look the way I wanted it to due to the unusual way the front end of the truck was designed (the headlights on those old Silverados were uncomfortably close to the wheel openings).

As the truck design project began, partially as a substitute for my failed Transformers project, I decided to focus first and foremost on a Chevrolet heavy-duty truck. The following image shows the design ideas I created for the initial design that I now call the "Old-School" look, due to my aim to go very traditional and somewhat retroactive.

This design is very conventional, almost totally work-minded. It has a solid metal bumper, separated headlights and grille area, and a body designed to take a beating. There really was nothing absolutely groundbreaking about this design, except for the fact that it was more solid in its physical appeal than what Chevrolet was selling at the time. One problem that I had to deal with was the fact that the front end design style was very close to that of the old 2008 Ford F-Series Superduty trucks... 

After that old-school design was completed, I thought about how I could do something radical. One thing that I wanted to try was the idea of circular headlights. Now, circular headlights worked well on the old 1968-1972 Chevrolet trucks because the front grille was almost flat. My truck design has a more curved front end and corners for aerodynamics. Due to this, the circular headlights appeared incredibly off, especially for a pickup truck. It is as if the Volkswagen Beetle had a very tough, strict father who always had a frown on his face. However, the body was beginning to take some shape... 

Almost a year later (due to a return to school and work schedules), I finally started getting a better idea of shape and some refinement for the front end. Still, I was going for round headlights, only this time they were housed in a trapezoid-like housing (the above two trucks). While this new, almost big-rig, look was working, it did not quite appear like something that would come from Chevrolet. Looking at it now, I feel that it could use some minor tweaks and it could actually work as an alternative look for the final design that I had finished. Eventually, I tried the old idea of stacked headlights and a horizontal front end theme, and I quickly scribbled the black ink sketch shown on the bottom left. This truck uses the same body design, but with a more traditional Chevrolet truck front end, and an invisible A and B pillar. When that sketch was completed, I new this was the one, and I was now finished with deciding on the basic look!

These sketches were finished around 2009 to 2012. It was about the time that I started opening my mind to all things automotive, and not showing any favoritism, bias, or prejudice. I started realizing just how exciting the automotive world really is, now that I am focusing on more than just Chevrolet and GMC trucks all the time. In fact, I feel that I started having a resentment towards General Motors at this point. The bailouts and the bankruptcy were angering the public quite a bit, but my resentment was a result of GM's questionable management more than those other things. I also had gotten rather tired of the often-times bland look of their vehicles, though recently, General Motors has been doing extremely well with their new releases, such as the 2014 Chevrolet Impala and the new C7 Corvette.

The Start of a Project

While finishing college and preparing for graduation, I started on a project that I had planned since junior high school. I only started very late because I felt I did not have the adequate skills to undertake such an endeavor back then. Even when the project was started, I had a faint feeling that this was going to be a long journey since my skills were still not up to task for such a project (in reality I did not need to shoot too high since this was my own personal project and not for a client, but I wanted to see if I could actually reach for the same level of skills that real automotive designers use out there). I could not afford to attend some of the well-known design schools across the country, so I tried to see if I could learn everything on my own, in my own ways. What followed is a journey that is yet to end, but has brought about some amazing and drastic things, such as incredible changes in my life and the way I view things in this world.

The true project started with some scribbles in a notebook paper:

Yes, it is a Chevrolet truck, not a nice BMW or a cool Ferarri... I have many reasons for the decisions, which I will get to later. Regarding the sketches, I was thinking of something nice and almost retroactive for a new Chevrolet truck design. I was quite disappointed by the "Ming the Merciless" front-end look of the 2003 through 2007 Silverado pickup trucks, and the GMT-900 Silverados, which debuted in 2007 were not any better. I was thinking of something a bit more solid looking, and more consistent than what General Motors was designing for their Chevrolet pickup trucks.

This sketch was pretty much THE start of the project, aside from the scribbles shown above. What I never worked on a the time are the GMC variants of these trucks. I will get to that subject matter later, though. For now, I wish to discuss this sketch. It was something I did while brainstorming ideas for how to tackle the project. The initial goal was to design four trucks (two for Chevrolet and two for GMC), and give them a more powerful, or revolutionary, design that can work with the traditional pickup truck configurations that have gone largely unchanged lately. For the Chevrolet trucks at least, I wanted to see if I could find a way to tie my design languages strongly with past Chevrolet trucks, such as the second-generation C/K trucks that were built from 1968 to 1972.

Since junior high school, I had gotten quite victimized by the whole fanfare of Chevrolet versus Ford. This fanfare, or fanboyism, ran until my early college years. It was not until I was finishing up college that I realized many errors in my life, mostly dealing with this fanfare, and the ugliness that had come about because of it (such as arguing with other fans on the internet forums, living under heavy bias and prejudice, and utter hate). Slowly, I worked to change myself. Taking some college courses in globalization and industrial history helped speed this up. I wish to dive into this subject matter a bit further later on. For now, I have covered some of the basics about how this project has started. Thank you for reading!

Greetings!

Hello there. This is my first blog ever, and it will be my primary site where I upload my art and design work, as well as in-progress sketches and projects. First of all, I want to try this out by posting some things, and then I'll explain some more things. I'll get started immediately with a few pictures...

This is a colored pencil sketch of a 1951 Chevrolet 3100 pickup truck with a long bed configuration, a supposed rare body option at the time.

 One of things I have been doing lately is custom chopper design. Unfortunately, I cannot upload any of my completed designs due to secrecy, so I have uploaded a marker drawing of a real chopper somebody built, that seemed really popular on the internet. This sketch was also my first ever automotive artwork done in the markers as well. It took a while, but anything done for the first time usually takes a long time!

This is another marker sketch, only this time it is my own car design. I only wanted to practice with marker coloring, so the design of the vehicle is a simple one, and not too well thought out honestly! It is a super-sized sedan with a coupe-like profile, and packing an Audi V-12 TDI engine. The rear taillight is a continuous "squircle" piece with some individual sections. I was aiming for a nice silver color, but I think I ended up making it chrome.

I have already uploaded numerous artwork and designs on other sites, such as my DeviantArt webpage and my Facebook page. I hope to use this blog more often than those other two sites since this blog has a format that allows for me to post "timelines" and progresses of projects. I am currently working on a large-scale project that has been in the works for almost three years now. It is still ongoing, and gaining momentum. The next post after this blog will be something pertaining to that project, if it has not been posted yet. Thank you for viewing!